ConceptualEnvironmental
Engineering

I can summarise our Innovations as being directed towards
using Architecture for the purpose towards which it was,
without doubt, originally invented and subsequently and
repeatedly developed up to the numerous peaks of achievement
that constitute (to our decayed architectural culture today)
its incredible History. This is the installation of what I
call a Conceptual, or Intellectual, Landscape.

The over-riding idea which JOA bring into being is not,
of course, 'space' or 'material', or 'form'. All of these
come into being automatically when anyone builds and are
quite useless, on their own, to our purpose, which is to
extend Architecture towards Literature and a more
sophisticated conceptual existence. For any medium to extend
towards universal communicability it must transcend its
'nature'. Its 'natural properties' are always a limitation
that must be 'exceeded'.Nor are our machines directed to
bring to mind the idea of 'function'. This is because
'function', when conceived physically (as it usually is by
architectural theory) should not be thought of as an idea at
all. When one eats food one is not going to be satisfied by
the mere idea of food. The Functoinalist 'style' was
one of the greater pieces of snake-oil trickery of the 20C -
substituting, as did much of its archaising politics, the
appearance of 'working' for the reality of usability.

The purpose of the Architecture-machines that we build is
to reify Time. Kafka wanted to stop time so that he could
stand back and see History. Husserl wanted to reify Time.
Neither were Architects. A 'literate architecture' can
install Time in the still centre of the hurricane of
History. This both stops time and restarts it on one's own
terms, so allowiing one the luxury of 'viewing' History
through a conceptual lens of one's own construction. Looking
in the other direction, viewing, as it were, oneslf as
Voyeur, one finds oneself upon a stage that can be described
as the Public Space required for a properly 'political'
culture in the wide sense described by Hannah Arendt. It is
delightful to be able to appear in a 'camera lucida'
illuminated by the 'mirror of eternity', even as one goes
about the most mundane of daily tasks.

Leaving aside whether this should, or should not, be done
and its various intellectual and social advantages as well
as its political dangers, for I deal with these in FAQ#12, I
can relate very simply, that the process of installing a
Time Machine, or Time Station, has four stages.

STAGE ONE:
NEGATION

The First stage is to
install Negation, or "Nothing". This is not to 'do nothing'.
Negation has to be inscribed so positively, or in such a
way, that it becomes embodied in real, natural, space. No
idea can be said to exist in the architectural medium unless
it is capable of being 'reified' in real space, not as an
object, but as an impalpable, idea, contingent with space
itself. This stage is examined in the essay:
"The
Empire of the Forest". The installation of Negation via
the less elephantine medium of scripted surface, rather than
by scripting space, is described in "The
Big Bang - Something about Nothing ", which deciphers
the Shaper Ceiling in Duncan Hall. The Order that mediates
Negation is the "The Serving Order
".

The Third stage is to
install the The Republic of the Valley
®. This is described, briefly, in the note of that
title further down this page. Unlike stages 1 and 2, Stage
Three, which may coincide with Duncanology Four, the
description of the body of Duncan Hall itself, is not yet
complete. My advice for the moment (July 2000) is to read
"Claude's Key" and "Cram's
Campus Plan " at Duncanology 2 and Duncanology 3.

As I describe, especially in FAQ#7, on Housing, neither
the First Stage nor the Second Stage can be effected without
the use of an Order. Our invention of a 'new' Order has been
described as an "Act of Architectural Terrorism". However as
the only people it seems to terrorise are Modern Architects
of taste and education, the Public should not be alarmed. We
have refrained from admitting any terrorism in our visa
applications to enter the USA! The Order that mediates
Habitation is the "The Walking Order
".

STAGE FOUR: INSCRIPTION -
PHYSICAL TECHNIQUES

The Fourth stage is to
install the Scripted
Surfaces which make 'patent' the ideas that are built
into the body of the building and its spaces. Due to the
almost complete lack of 'surface decoration' in late 20C
Mainstream Modernism, JOA have been obliged to develop,
along with the industries concerned, a range of
surface-scripting technologies for both the outside as well
as the inside of our very 'normative' building projects.

BLITZCRETE

The First such
technique, first used in 1982 at Wadhurst Park, was
"Blitzcrete ". This breaks-up
fragments of brick and uses them decoratively, like a
large-scale terrazzo, in pre-cast units. It can be made in
any combination of colours. Its iconic vocabulary is, of
course limited to that of depicting an elemental violence.
But as I describe in 'Raft of Fire', this is neither foreign
to Architecture, nor to its Modern sensibility.

DOODLECRETE

Nevertheless it was necessary to progress to
"Doodlecrete", theSecond
of the surface-scripting techniques to be invented.
Doodlecrete inlays one concrete colour into another, using
rubber moulds that can inscribe any pattern, hence "doodle".
It was first used in 1992, on the Judge Institute Project,
in Cambridge, England. Both the First and Second Innovations
are weather-resistant and capable of being used externally.
Their most advanced use, technically, to date, is in the
"Millennium Pavilion , in
Wadhurst Park, Sussex, England.

VIDEO-SECCO

A Third technique was
"videosecco" . It
was developed after the final rejection, after nine months
of intensive design labour, of a 1/12-scale tempera
painting, by Inigo Rose, of the 120'0"-long design of the
buon-fresco ceiling proposed by JOA for the ceiling of the
Judge Institute. Video-Secco ultimately bore fruit, in 1996,
in the Shaper
Ceiling , for Duncan Hall, of Rice University, Houston,
Texas.

VIDEO-MASONRY

A Fourth technique was
"videomasonry". This was
developed during a long process of experimentation, starting
in 1989. It slowly eliminated all the known techniques for
creating surface-scripted curved plaster tiles, suitable for
cladding JOA's giant, 1.5 - 3 Metre (5'0" to 10'0") diamater
columns. The solution was worked-out for the Judge Institute
Project. The designs were made for 3,400 'aleatory' A3
panels cut from a larger design. Each of the eight
column-registers, to a height of 26M (80'0") was composed
both vertically and horizontally. They were to be
monoprinted from A3 laser prints. The light-fast
powder-pigment is transferred to the plaster and the paper
thrown away. Companies were formed, funding was provided by
a special donation from one of our own Clients. Everything
was ready to roll. It would undoubtedly have made the Judge
Interior the most visually splendid as well as the most
intellectually powerful room in Cambridge, bar none.

But this was to exceed the station of a mere 'educational
building' as one of those on the Committee described it. A
sumptuary law still obtains in Britain. The 'Architecural
Heritage', even though it remains puny compared to Italy, or
India, can never be overtopped, exceeded and put into the
shadow. Britain, as the Establishment knows, has seen her
finest hours.One can not have anything Modern 'competing on
the same terms' with this Heritage. This why everything
'new' in Britain has to be so very 'different', even to the
point of being 'Punk'. It is to preserve the 'Heritage' from
the unmentionable fate of being relegated to second best.
Britain needs a Hera to deceive this child-devouring old
Monster and bring forth someone capable of raising the
stakes above rehashes of the Indian Railways Dining Room
style.

Video-Masonry was again proposed in 1997, to clothe the
columns in the Can-do Room in Duncan Hall. 2,400 curved
plaster tiles were shipped from Britain to the USA. However,
by then, the project was too far advanced to negotiate a
sensible erection price with the Plasterwork Subcontractor.
The Building and Grounds Committee were willing to go the
final mile - as they often are in Texas. But I decided that,
having allowed every colour in this vast interior to be
intelligently scripted, and the floor to be patently a
version of the 'Empire of the Forest', and the Ceiling to be
an advent of the 'Raft of Fire', and the exterior to be a
'Mountain of Water', and the whole building to be a
'Republic of the Valley' situated in a Campus that was
already a 'Valley-Republic', this wonderful Committee had
already fulfilled every expectation that an unreasonable
Architect could have!

STAGE FOUR: INSCRIPTION -
INTELLECTUAL TECHNIQUES

ICONIC
ENGINEERING

To be concluded.

"

The three faces of the
"SIXTH ORDER"

"BUT IT WAS ALWAYS SO".

The days are long gone by when one could make an argument
for something by saying "but it was always so". It is true
that an 'Order', that is to say a characteristic column and
superstructure, was always a prime tool, and manifestation,
of the phenomenon: "Architecture". But then so was
superstition and unreasonable, arbitrary, and cruel force a
prime manifestation of leadership and authority. The
argument 'from tradition' finally petered-out with the
advent of the Twentieth Century, having begun to be attacked
in the Eighteenth. The fact that it flared-up once again, in
the 1970's, even after the horrors of Fascism and Communism,
is not a proof of the virtues of Tradition, but a mark of
the intellectual inadequacy of the West in failing to so
understand its own inheritance as to succeed in modernising
it rather then merely abolishing , destroying and erasing
it.

A MODERN ETHIC

For the only acceptable argument for anything is that it
is useful in progressing an 'ethic of freedom', that is to
say one founded on information, choice and self-discipline,
unlikely though it may often seem that such values will ever
'win-out' in the end. For, although this is the ethic of
Modernity, one sees everywhere the 'spin' of propaganda, and
a compulsion to excess - in short the very human tendencies
that lead to regimes employing superstition and
violence.

Thus my argument for an Architectural 'Order', akin to
those of Tradition, is that it is necessary to any
Institution that hopes to govern itself in accordance with a
modern ethic and to advertise this not only to itself,
(which is the more important, for an ethic must be supported
from 'within'), but also to the outside world.

VARIETIES OF BLIND
FAITH

'Progressives' are always eager to dispense with
tradition in any of its known forms. Yet so little do they
know about them that they can often creep up behind them and
play them tricks, as it has on Norman Foster in the glass
dome of the Berlin Bundestag, where the 'luminous spearing'
of the 'aqueous mountain' ringed by the 'spiralling serpent
of time' would have rendered Himmler's 'Aryan' Iconographers
quite delirious with joy. The works of 'Progressives' is
marked by an ignorant destructiveness, as well as an
occasional huge (but sometimes wonderfully benign) 'error'.
For who but the 'naif' Foster could have reinstated the
Vedic Cosmogenesis as an emblem of Democracy, in Germany of
all places? For me it is by far his greatest deed. I trust
that he claims it as aforethought.

This rabidly 'anti-traditional' stance betrays the same
intellectual enfeeblement as the anti-historical stance of
Double-breasted Doric devotees at the shrine of the Eternal
Stonesmith. It is a strange fact that after the 'putsch' of
the Classicists that destroyed the experiment in
multicultural pedagogy, that was the Prince of Wales
institute under Professor Adam Hardy, the one subject for
which the Students showed the least aptitude was History.
Neo-neo-Classicism is as much an uninformed, uninventive and
unhistorical ideology as is its supposed 'Minimalist' enemy
and 'Technophiliac' opposite.

The peculiar fact of contemporary architectural practice
is that one may normally find, especially in Old Europe, the
Progressive Architect and the Traditional Architect working
side by side on a project that seeks to combine the 'New'
with the 'Old'. Yet such is the distaste of the one for the
other, that however closely their Clients may seek to join
them, the marriage of the Past and the Future is never
consummated. The Present is always stillborn being merely a
sterile conjunction, not an intimate union leading to a
novel invention.

HOW TO BOTH BE AND BE
PRESENT.

To be born it is necessary to 'begin at the beginning'
and embody the 'coming into the being of the new and the
true'. This is the four-stage process of JOA's Architecture.
A cubic, trabeated, space-and-surface-framing is necessary
to our Architectural Narrative. If this is accepted, then it
becomes necessary to use an 'Order'. But it is no good, at
this time in History, calling up an Order out of some book,
and expecting it to 'work'. It has to be designed to
function. This pursuit of 'functionality' is what has
led JOA to the invention and 40-year 'proving' of the Three
Orders that we use. The name that we use for the whole
'genera' of Orders is the 'Working' Order. This is then
divided into three kinds, the 'Serving', 'Walking' and
'Talking' orders.

Their division into three is philosophically useful, so
as to explain them. Its reverse, their combination into one
or more Architectural instruments, is the more likely
tendency of Practice.

THE 'WORKING'
ORDER

The 'Working' Order was the
first to be invented, dating from the very beginnings of
JOA, in the Christofides Interior, back in 1973. We have
used it on virtually every project since that date. It
corresponds to the Vitruvian category of Firmitas -
translated in to English as 'Firmness'. We roll all of the
physical 'supports' of a modern buiding into this single
category, and bury them all within the 'Robot Column' and
the 'Robot Entablature', or Beam. We derived from this
invention, in 1983, the name Ordine Robotico, or 'Working
Order', which we have used ever since as the generic name of
the whole JOA Order.

THE 'TALKING'
ORDER

The next to be created, as an idea, was the 'Talking'
Order. This can be dated to the New Laboratory for the
Consumer's Association, in Milton Keynes. The design of this
project was taken to complete production drawings and Tender
before aborting due to the 1991 property value crash and the
boiling-up of consequent re-location policy disagreements
within the C.A. The interior had been designed to a high
level. More importantly, JOA had, by the cancellation, done
enough work on techniques of iconic engineering to be
confident that there was more than one cheap, quick and
technically-intensive way to inscribe bespoke patterns,
colours and images on internal surfaces, even curved ones.
We can date the invention of the 'Talking' Order to 1990. It
corresponds to the third of the Vitruvian Triad, of
Venustas, Englished as 'Delight'.

THE 'WALKING'
ORDER

The third of the triad, the
'Walking' ('Walkin'" or 'Walk-in') Order is the most
novel. Serviced columns and surface-decorated columns, while
uncommon, are not entirely unknown. But we have to look very
far afield, to sites like Angkor Thom, to find a prior
version of the 'Walkin' Order, with a Podium that is also a
'Camera Lucida' - a room through which one can walk. Not
only is a column of this sort entirely unkown in Western
Architecture, but it also corresponds to the most important
of the Vitruvian categories, the central one of Commoditas.
This is the category most abused by 20C architecture. Which
is to say that 20C 'Functionalist Planning' is the practice
that both seeks to descend from it yet most travesties its
genealogy.

"FUNCTIONALISM" IS DEAD, LONG
LIVE 'WORKING'!

This Tripartite 'Working' Order up-ends the notion of
functionality in lifespace design. The 20C, mainly to deny
authenticity to the Architectural Order, proposed that a
radically 'functional' lifespace design would focus upon the
precise shape of the space (rooms, also, were abolished)
that would best facilitate the use to which human beings put
the building. This notion, still hung on-to by the
Profession like one of the tablets from the magic mountain,
has eventually ceased to persuade anyone but the most
academically insulated retailers of 20C design theory.
Indeed so implausible has it become that contemporary
'Critical Theory' proposes that instead of an idea that does
not work, the clever thing is to build a lifespace that does
not work. Curiously, this preserves the original 20C 'myth
of functional space-shaping' by proving that if the shape of
a space can not help its occupants to 'work better' then it
sure can screw up any hope that it can work at all!

SUICIDE BOMBING THE WAY TO A
'REAL FUTURE'

This fashionable 'contra-functional', and
'counter-formal' design strategy is sold as a means to
escape from the "Authoritarian rule of a Fascistic Reason" -
Critical Theory is no stranger to hyperbole - into a
Real-World of Chaos, muddle and vital truth. The aleatory
and otherwise obscure formal exercises of Eisenmann and
Liebeskind are eagerly examined by Architects eager to 'stay
with it'. Fortunately few of them have the requisite frenzy
for fame required to entirely depart the normative.
Adolescence has a way of mercifully ending, for the
majority, even, of Architects.

FEAR OF FREEDOM

The Three Orders of Working, for the first time in the
History of Architecture, contain within them almost every
resource normally associated with qualites that people
entertain when they ask "Yes, but does the building
'work'?". The 'Serving Order' contains every physical
'service', from electronics to anti-gravity. Structural
columns and beams are treated as 'miscellaneous pipework'
that may, as in the Judge, be made physically patent, or
may, as in the Duncan, be rendered iconically. The 'Talking
Order' can carry varieties of iconically-manifested
intelligencies. The 'Walking Order' can serve as the
circulation corridors and pedestrian galleries and arcades
of a building. It can also, as it did in the Battersea
Project, enlarge to accomodate wheeled vehicles and become a
Drive-in Order. All of the functions of a building are
satisfied within the profile and footprint of the 'Working
Order' except the final purpose and 'luxury' of
Architecture, the room-spaces themselves.

The devastating effect of this massive 'empowerment' of
the Architectural Order, upon the received 20C design
ideology, is that the usable space of the building is set
free of the useless ideological straitjacket of a nefarious
spatial 'functionalism'. The lifespace is freed of the
legitimate burden of the Building's Architecture. Its rooms
are free to be used, and even abused, by its human owners.
Their activities can neither fundamentally detract from, nor
enhance, the in-built Order of the Building. In short the
User if freed from the Building. By so doing, the User, and
the Order of the Building, exist as independent agencies and
entities. They can live in peace with each other.

The Working Order allows the building user to perform
whatever function is facilitated by drawing whatever
physical resources they wish from the columns and beams of
the 'Service Order'. The user can 'theme' and 'style' the
room-space (rooms return in the JOA system!) by
iconically-structuring the six planes framed-out by the
'trabeated' members of the Order. To all 'good' Modern
architects this sounds like the prescription for a
'nightmare scenario' in which the user merely orders-up
assorted technical services and then papers his or her room
with fantasy-decorations. Where is the 'pure-soul' of the
Modern Architect left in this situation?

THE TRUTH OF
FREEDOM.

Well, the truth must be faced, and Las Vegas is the place
to go to stare it in its polystyrene facade. Cubic
aggregations of rooms is what people build, and failing
Building Owners, Users and Architects who desire a more
intellectual lifespace than Disney or Vegas, then 'themed
design' is what they will get. The question is not whether
theming will triumph but whether, if ever, the High Culture
of the Text will ever have the 'face' to climb down from its
Minimalist Mountain or emerge from its High-Tech
Terror-Machine and take on the Pop Culture of the Image in
the only arena that counts, The Street.

For the Orders not only 'reify' philosphy, or truth, as
Alberti knew. Which is why he promoted the whole, elaborate,
architectural and decorative system of the Renaissance. The
trabeated theatre of the en-cubing Ordine also lend their
authority to banality, stupidity and evil. But then what is
Freedom if we are prevented, by the miasmic veils promoted
by Loos, from both making our choices, and revealing, in the
glare of the Public Arena, either how clever, or how dumb,
we really are? The Architectural Orders, and the iconic
'texts' they enframe and empower, are the best foundaiton
upon which not only to build a civilised lifespace, but one
that employs both Architecture, and Architects, of technical
skill and wide culture.

"Scripted
Space"

"The Empire of the
Forest"

SCRIPTING
ANTI-SPACE.

Mies van der Rohe said that the first thing that he did
when he went to the site of a new Project was to "Divine the
Grid". It is not known whether Mies used the method of
seeing whether certain birds flew to the left or to the
right, or the messier tool of haruspication, that is to say
the inspection of a freshly slaughtered animal liver. For
Mies was a well-read man and a student of Thomas Aquinas and
would have known of both of these Classical precedents.
Perhaps it is just as well that he did not reveal his method
as the 'Method Acting' school of Architectural pedagogy
might be inclined, such is the desperation of contemporary
educationalists, to give sheep-whacking a whirl.

Seriously though....Mies was on to something. For behind
the Grid was the Hypostyle. And for what can be erected
behind, or rather below, or should we say 'before' the
Hypo-Stylion, read on by clicking on the illustration of the
"Ocean of Trees".

For a view of the Architectural Order that JOA use to
embody the Hypostyle try the "Serving
Order".

SURFING THE SURFACE OF THE
NON-EXISTENT

Ricoeur recounts, in Book One of 'Time and Narrative',
that St. Augustine describes God as choosing, before he
created the World, to create Nothing.We can extend this
notion to propose that nothing comes into existence, and
especially into existence as an idea, without the company of
its opposite, its negation. How does one know white, except
as the inseperable companion to black? It is important,
then, if Architecture is to perform, as I propose, as a
medium capable of reifying ideas, that we find a way to
embody Nothing. But how can this be done? After all nothing
is not a thing and Architecture is about things.

Fortunately we have progressed beyond the state of the
Philosophers in Gulliver's Travels who obliged themselves to
carry huge knapsacks stuffed with objects which, being
dedicated to the truth, they preferred to offer each other,
in conversation, in lieu of merely 'lying words'. "Nothing"
is an idea, and like all ideas can be 'mediated', that is
brought to the middle ground that is the counter across
which things are exchanged. In short ideas can be carried by
metaphors from one extreme of a medium to the other and also
dispensed sideways, and at an angle, as in the game of
Chess.

"Scripted
Space"

"The Act of
Foundation"

For an idea to be come into being it must be born. It
must have a beginning. When the idea is Time, conceived
absolutely, sub specie aeternatis, "in the mirror of
eternity", and we have embodied the Time Before Time Began
or The Time of Anti-Time - by inscribing and embodying the
Hypostyle, as described in "Empire
of the Forest", we can not rely on some merely material
debris remaining from the contingencies of 'History'. We
have to, almost literally, 'kick-start' the machine of our
'Time-Station'.This is, as one might expect from the
properties of 'Timelessness' a necessarily abrupt and
violent act. The 'Act of Foundation' is the moment when the
clock did not merely begin to tick. It is the moment when
Time itself came into being, and Space as well, for where
would Time have its Being if there was nowhere for it to
'be'.

In Architecture, bound as it is to the 'natural space' we
know through our bodies and their organs of sense and
intelligence, such a very big 'Bang' is not going to be the
cause of a one-on-one replication of the 'true original'. it
is no good putting foreward the dumb old 'Arts and Crafts'
pleas for truth to materials and craftsmanship! The only
time we can hope for a 'real' replication of Event No. 1 is
if, as seems unlikely (if one believes what one reads in the
scientific papers), there is a Big Crunch. We are dealing
here with our own puny, human, scale of things of which the
only grandeur (and hope of 'exemplification' of the 'true
original' is to be obtained through Mentality - whose medium
is the Metaphor.

This section of the installation of the Time Machine is
explored in "Raft of
fire - Mountain of water", so there is little point is
paraphrasing it here. For its exemplification one may go to
many of our projects, for all, in their own ways, have used
the Architectural Devices described in this essay.

The idea of a raft, or ark, is common to many
civilizations, ancient and modern - they were used to carry
people, fire, and civilzations to new lands, or to display
them in 'parades'. The roof structure of a classical
building recalls a raft structure- its support members are
often called "rafters". A decking on the rafters supports a
pyramidal roof, or "pyre". The word "entablature" is used to
describe that part of the building above the columns,
apparantly derived from in-tablatum, meaning a table
or planked surface. The tablinum was a room where one kept
pictures, painted on wooden planks.

In JOA's buildings, classical ideas are re-interpreted in a
completely new way. The logs of the raft are often expressed
above the capitals. The are still dripping wet, the swirls
reminding us of the chaotic waters of the flood. Above the
logs is placed a green deck or table upon which the ark
rides, and where people can actually 'live'. As the waters
of the flood receded, it eroded the mountain on which the
ark had come to rest into the river valley, revealing in the
process the orderly hypostyle of columns. This erosion is
evident in the geological striations expressed on the
columns.

The underside of the raft appears as the ceiling of the
interior spaces of the buildings. In the major spaces a view
into it can be revealed in the form of a decorated ceiling
(eg. The main Hall, Duncan Hall, Rice University).

The myth of the raft is used , in the same way as the
The Republic of the Valley ,as
an organising principle to mirror life and ideas in the
massing and architecture of the buildings.

"The Republic of the
Valley"

The "Republic of the Valley" is the third stage of the
Architecural Process that I call, in FAQ #12, "Installing an
intellectual landscape" (Not yet written, as of July 2000).
It comes after stage one, the Installation of Negation,
described in "Empire of the Forest", and stage two, the Act of Foundation, described in
"Raft of Fire - Mountain of Water".

This 'third stage', the Republic of the Valley, or Valley
of the Republic, treats with the subject of the Social space
of the Institution that occupies a building, from a
family-sized group up to a University or even, as in the
case of the Greek Poleis, the Model of the City-State, or as
Glotze describes it, 'Valley-State'. The 'Republic of the
Valley' suits any 'historically' self-conscious social
entity.

This is why, for example, one finds no such spaces in Las
Vegas, for all of the surfeit of surface scripting and
scenic 'architecture'. People go to Vegas to escape from
their 'social identity' and institutional commitments.
Everything in Vegas is broken down into labyrinthine small
spaces suitable for the commitment of minor acts of somewhat
worthless immorality that have the peculiar effect of
refreshing the psyche so that it may return to real business
in order to contemplate more serious crimes against Humanity
and Nature.

Seen through the lens of Architecture what is interesting
about 20C built space is how often it denies a social group
the place in which it becomes self-conscious of itself as a
social entity. Typically this is done by the insertion of a
'service core' into the spatial centre of the building's
footprint. All of the great 20C moderns did this, from Frank
Lloyd Wright, through Corbusier and Alvar Aalto up to Mies
van der Rohe. All of them maximised the view out and away
from the building and minimised the view into its centre. By
doing this they blinded any view that the occupants of the
building had of each other. These typical 20C lifespaces
divided people from each other. It forced them, instead, to
gaze over a prospect of tree-tops and clouds, again divested
of human occupation and activity.

What did this peculiar lifespace-geometry imply and
entail? Why fry in the sun and gaze on clouds when you could
be swapping ideas with a Colleague or sitting in a Seminar
balcony with one's laptop pounding some dull figures while
watching over the theatre of one's firm - refreshing one's
commitment to its conceptual microcosmos while also checking
who was with who and getting the buzz on the street? Seen
like this the much vaunted parti of the skyscraper and the
Miesian Office block reads as an exercise in 'divide and
rule' Taylorisation, rather than a plan to supercharge the
self-regulating momentum of a well-constituted
Organisation.

All of JOA's buildings have, from even before the firm
was founded, as one may see in the project for the Burrell
Museum of 1972, explored the potential of installing the
'Valley Republic'. Our most successful installation to date
is the interior of the Faculty of Computational Engineering
for Rice University, Houston Texas. This one really does
'work' at all sorts of levels. Many of these are magically
trivial, such as the annual paper dart contest, now
transformed by having a variety of high-level launching
platforms and many kinds of 'piste' - or illegal
rollerblading across its polychrome terrazzo canvas. Other
occasions, such as the 'Founder's Dinner' described in "Raft
of Fire", monumentalise ideas of the profoundest kind.

The Valley of the Republic will be fully explored, as an
Architectural strategy, when Duncanology Four, the
description of Duncan Hall, as a building, is published.
Until then, the Reader can turn to "Claude's
Key" to read about the history of its 'discovery', and
"Cram's Campus" to follow the
application of its understandings to the decipherment of a
large composition that has taken around 100 years to
achieve, to date.

"The Social
Stair"

Ruth Glass, making some research in the 1950's,
established that skyscrapers were less effective in
encouraging the off-hand, casual, and usually to-the-point,
communication that stems from 'on-the-street' face-to-face
social interaction. Departments got departmentalised and
kingdoms were built, fortified and fossilised on each of the
separate floors of a tall building. All of this was improved
if the organisation was housed in what have come to be
called, much later, 'groundscrapers'.

JOA have taken these long-established facts further,
establishing the idea of Lifespace, Bodyspace or 'Embodied
space' as a balancing antidote to 'Cyberspace'. Workers now
travel long hours to work, sitting down. They then work at
CTR's, again sitting down. The 'bodyspace' of a building is
the space, essentially centralised within the bulk of a
building, that is deliberately designed to 'present' people
to each other as 'actors on a stage', that is as fully
embodied beings, rather than as merely 'talking heads', or
disembodied voices.

This social space is, as one would expect, distributed
over more than one floor. The 'social Stair' is the system
of stairs designed to theatricalise the process of moving
between floors. It is necessary to see the occupants of all
the surrounding social spaces, such as the Seminar Boxes or
the visually accessible meeting rooms, and so on.

"The
Seminar-Balcony"

THE CONTEXT

The Seminar-Balcony is the opposite of the
'picture-window, the 'fenetre en longeur' of Corbusier's
holocaust gaze - razing cities to their Monuments and
thieving bizarreries from Nature - Brazilian volcanic plugs,
tropical beaches and so on. The Seminar-Balcony is a box in
the theatre of a play which mankind must write for itself -
a new Microcosmos - and delineated inside his own world -
one he makes for himlself, neither stealing that of God nor
changing it (as Colomina has argued) into some puerile
tourist's postcard.

THE CATALYST

The Seminar-Balcony was an idea waiting to happen for
many years in JOA. The actual catalyst was the briefing by
Paul Judge and Professor Stephen Watson, in 1990, that the
Judge Institute was to have:

"No double-sided corridors"

It was also to have:

"Places where people could work in
groups in the open in such a way that they could see who was
there. Then it was necessary that if there was someone that
they saw, and wanted to meet, a meeting could occur, by
accident-on-purpose".

This latter seemed a very English quality, and also quite
Cambridge, in that it was not entirely polite to just bear
down on someone famous, wealthy or powerful who might have
been good enough to give a lecture or a seminar at the
Institute, and had been persuaded to carry-on conversing on
one of the Balconies.

The "gallery-building", itself, emerged out of this
briefing and was the main reason for JOA winning the
competition. Then, soon afterwards, the 8-person
Seminar-Balconies began to 'sprout out', pushing into the
gallery-space, winning back part of this luxurious void as
'rentable floorsplace' such that 300 people can, if so
required, sit and work in the open in the cafe-society,
'vertical street', Galleria of the Judge. Finally the
'Social Stair' arrived into the design. It climbs up amongst
the tiers of Seminar-balconies, along a triangularly
footprinted route. The Gallery room-plan became both
theatrical as well as labyrinthine, making some meetings
genuinely accidental!

ICONIC
ENGINEERING

Iconologically, the Seminar-Balconies are designed either
like the prow of ship, pointing out into the void of the
'Republic of the Valley', or like an 'inhabited bridge' that
spans the Valley. In the Judge the balconies had curved
wooden 'hulls' and red-painted prows. In Rice their green
floor-edge, in cyma-reversa form, signifies Corbusier's "New
Earth", and the 'Raft of the Founders'. It rode on a larger,
blue-painted, cyma-recta moulding. Kyma means wave in
Greek.

To function succesfully the modern building, with its all
pervasive but necessary TV's and VDU's, must create as part
of its brief spaces for people to meet and converse.
Corridors, lifts and their associated lobbies are simply not
enough. In addition (and with the blessing of clients) we
provide frequent comfortably furnished gathering areas,
close to, but not directly on, main circulation routes. They
offer daylight and longer views of interior spaces to foster
a sense of community and conversely to animate the interior
with a sense of energy and purpose.

The 'seating box' is a particularly dramatic form of
outworking area that projects into a large central space
(the canyon of the 'The Republic of the
Valley' above) with alcoves provided for soft and
comfortable seating. It affords its occupants both a 'cosy'
sense of intimacy and a feeling of belonging to a much
larger organisation, of which it has eye-catching views.

In completed projects at Rice University and Cambridge
University these have proved so succesful they are
frequented by staff from neighbouring buildings.

The "Goat
Paths"

All Architectural space is 'internal'. The rest is
scenery - picturesque fancies, Mayan moongazing and Celtic
cloud-conjuring. All outward-looking cultures came to
nothing in the end, falling under the power of the one's
that founded the West. These were the inward-looking
cultures that built a roof over their heads, shutting out
the sky and replacing it with a Microcosmos, a view of what
really lay 'beyond'. It was the ability of these
inward looking cultures to sack their Sumerian Magi, their
seers and shamans, and create a shared view of the realities
as they best understood them, and act within that open,
Public, and debatable, consensus, that has led to the West
and to progress. It is the collapse of that ability to live
within a true Kosmos of our own creation that has led to the
'fall' of the 'Western Project', and not because it was
'defeated' from without, but because of its own inability to
revise its Microcosmos to take account of new understandings
of Reality.

This 'internal space' is literally the microcosmic space
within which the West has lived, constructing its proper,
and true, 'landscape of ideas'. The 'Republic of the Valley'
is this space at the 'human' scale of domesticity and
inhabitation - from the house to the city. All building, in
the city of the future, will prioritise the fabrication of
these 'conceptual landscapes'. All building design will
prioritise the method of locomotion proper to the traversal
of these landscapes - which can only be walking, or for the
disabled, wheelchairs and electric 'buggies'. Cars,
especially, have no priority at all in such places. One can
not ruminate upon complex ideas when driving one. Their
roads, in such places, should be mainly buried. Buses and
trains allow one to think, so they may be given some
consideration within the envelope of iconic, conceptual,
intelligent design. But walking and wheelchairing are the
only media of movement of any importance to the synthetic,
'built', landscapes that constitute the consensual, freely
constituted, 'view of reality' that is the Architecture of
the 'western' ontology and foundation of Progress.

Calling this 'walker's terrain' the 'goat paths' is a way
of dramatising the spatial drama as well as 'long view'
typical of the precipitous terrain of goats. The corridors
and bridges and balconies which are needed to both circulate
around the 'Republic of the Valley' as well as use it as the
'landscape of consensual ideas', cling to the steep sides of
the valley. From them one looks out into the
Iconically-Engineered 'landscape' of the architectural
interior as Microcosm. This is so whether the Walker is
inside an actual building or, as at Rice, out- of-doors but
inside a Campus. Outside or Inside, all
conceptually-coherent landscapes are 'interior spaces'.

The "Basilican
Core"

At the beginning of the 20C the screen finally went
black. God and his angels ceased transmitting. The 'black
box' of the Western Interior was no longer a place where one
could eat under a micro-cosmic sky that revealed, like the
video from some deep-space probe, the true shape of the
'reality that lay behind appearances'. This terrible event,
foreshadowed in the history of Painting, placed the centre
of the plan out of bounds. One could not have people sitting
in the focal place of the community gazing upwards at a
black sky. Anything might happen! People might go mad at the
thought that there was no reality beyond what they could
simply see in front of them, or, even worse for social
order, that the Savants of their time could not see their
way to its delineation.

So the central place was defiled with toilets and
slop-rooms and fire stairs and elevators and the outer walls
of all buildings were removed and made of glass. Corbusier
uttered the magic word "Crack"( first of all in Rio de
Janiero) and, as he put it: "Nature was inscribed in the
Lease". The view from the huge glass walls was purified by
removing all signs of human habitation. The New View, as
described in Corbusier's "Home of Man", required that the
Cities of the West be demolished and great forest trees
planted over their graves.

Kahn was the rebel against this Holocaust View, allied to
the Public Conservation Movement. Then High-Tech picked up
the ongoing history of the 'Service Core'. Finally the JOA
'Basilican Core' (incidentally re-charting 'Beaux-Arts
Planning) unblocked the 'central thrombosis' allowing social
life to flow, once more, through the focus of the plan. But
the problem of the 'perspective' into Transcendency had
still to be solved.

The "Solar
Spiral"

The opening of a big space, deep in the centre of a
'ground-scraper', is a not uncommon Architectural procedure
these days. Such a building was, indeed,described to me, in
Houston, by the Building Control Officer, as a "Skyscraper
lying on its side" - the skyscraper being the normal way of
building in downtown Houston. All such internal spaces, even
in the tropical parts of the World, where the sun beats down
with a ferocity unknown in a temperate climate like that of
London, tend to be covered in a glass roof. This means that
they overheat in the daytime and go an unprepossesing black
colour at night.

The JOA design strategy requires that the 'Service Core'
of the early 20C 'glass-walled' style of plan is replaced by
the "Basilican Core" needed
by the inward-looking, theatrical, social space of the
"Republic of the Valley". It is
necessary to make this roof solid. This is both to avoid
overheating this inner space, and to release its ceiling to
function within the device of the 'Raft of Fire' needed to
discharge the "Act of
Foundation". So it is necessary to design the built-up
space around these big interiors so as to allow them to be
naturally lit, and yet not overstressed by too much light,
and especially, heat.

Scripted
Surface:

"Blitzcrete"

Wittgenstein advised that "one should remain silent
concerning things of which one cannot speak". Another of his
compatriots, Karl Kraus, advised that "anyone who had
someone to say should step forward and remain silent". There
were people in Vienna to which these advices applied. One
can think of a certain Corporal who managed to totally ruin
everything he touched in a mere decade of insane leadership.
Nevertheless 'keeping silent' is a bit desperate really, a
bit makeshift, a bit of a workaround, while things get
sorted-out.

Blitzcrete is a good example of how to say the
'unspeakable' without 'speaking'. An innocently-pretty
confection of broken bricks set in white sand and cement can
be taken as a mere masonry wall-paper, or as a cross-section
through the Column of Fire, the 'columna lucis', with which
the Upperness and Lowerness were joined, 'at the beginning',
re-prototyping the long-lost Architectural Column. It is all
a matter of the 'Iconic Culture' broght to the scene by the
'knowing eye'.

'Blitzcrete' was developed by JOA, and the firm of
Diespeker, owned by the Krause Brothers, and with the
special technical help of David Knowles, a genius in the
matter of coloured and patterned concrete, with whom JOA
have worked, steadily, for 25 years. 'Blitzcrete' came to
mind after seeing some 'Dutch concrete' exposed by the
reconstruction of four big London houses damaged during the
'39 War. Fragments of bricks are cast into a cement and sand
matrix which itself can also be made any colour. The surface
is then ground-back to reveal the bricks.The advantage of
brick over stone is that most stone bleaches to grey while
brick, being a ceramic, retains its colour.

Being a concrete, it is a formally-versatile material. It
can be cast into a variety of solid-looking shapes. This can
be used to obscure the fact that all modern buildings are
paper-thin skins over skeletal frameworks. Concrete weathers
badly, but colouring and patterning it takes the eye off
this. Making the patterns symbolic helps to entertain the
mind even further.

"Doodlecrete"

After the development of 'Blitzcrete', the 'primordial'
material, JOA needed a surface, usable externally, in all
sorts of weather, that could receive the 'free inscription'
that one could call the 'iconic writing' that has been the
ambition of Western iconographers, savants and artists, for
many centuries. We christened this "Doodlecrete".

It is made of a through-colour casting concrete that is
'inscribed' with an undercut groove by the use of a silicone
rubber mould. The undercut 'vee'-shape is necessary to hold
the concrete paste that is pressed into the 'grooves' left
by the 'doodling stylus'. Its only use to date has been to
inscribe the 'canonic logs' of the Trabeated 'raft of fire'
with images of the clouds, and sea, over which the blue raft
'drifts', carrying the Cargo of the Founders during its
voyage towards the place at which the 'Act of Foundation'
will take place.

"Video
Masonry"

One of our needs was to be able to 'surface script'
interior columns, walls, ceilings and floors with Iconically
Engineered figures.

"Video-Masonry, and 'Video-Secco' are two of the
techniques evolved to enable us to achieve such an 'interior
scripting'. The levels of iconic density that they can
achieve far greater than those open to Blitzcrete, or even
to Doodlecrete. But then that is in proportion with the
greater importance of the Interior.

VIDEO
MASONRY

Designs for the faces of columns, or for whole walls, are
drawn in or scanned onto a PC computer. Given the physical
size of these images and the level of resolution required,
the resulting files are very large. Using software such as
Live Picture, these large files can be manipulated,
'tiled ' and printed out onto sheets using a colour
photocopier with a "RIP" as the link to the PC. We have
demonstrated output onto A3 tiles. These prints are 'offset'
onto plain A3+ plaster tiles using a process called
'monoprinting' where a solvent dissolves the bond between
the fused toner paper and transfers the image onto the
plaster. A recessed 'rusticated' joint between the tiles
minimises registration problems and makes the tiles quick to
apply.

The durability of the process has been tested by PIRA and
given a 'blue wall' rating of 6 giving it a long life in an
interior situation

This process was exhibited live at the Information Society
Initiative sponsored by the Department of Trade Industry in
London on 13th February 1996 and was the subject of a press
release issued by the President of the Board of Trade.

The images are economical to apply. They can be kept on disk
and re-applied if damaged, or replaced with updated versions
- hence the term "video masonry".

"Video
Secco"

GENERAL HISTORY

It was while designing big exhibitions for the Victoria
and Albert Museum, in London, that JOA first met up with the
idea that the printing industry had developed techniques
which might be adapted to serve our project of foregrounding
large-scale 'scripted surfaces'. We could have used these
techniques to solve our technical and financial problems in
creating a scripted ceiling for the Judge Institute project
in Cambridge University, England. However the proud
ignorance concerning modern art that one finds in all levels
of English society, resulted in JOA being instructed: "not
to use any modern techniques to inscribe the ceiling of the
Judge".

AN EXEMPLARY PROJECT.

These peculiarly illiterate constraints did not apply to
our work in the USA. So it was that on December 12, 1995,
JOA were commissioned, after a donation by Sue and Steve
Shaper, to make a 'scripted' ceiling for the Martell Hall,
the 'can-do' hall in the centre of Duncan Hall, the new
Computational Engineering Faculty of William Marsh Rice
University, Houston, Texas. By August 1996, this 72'0" x
52'0" (22m x 16m) (developed surface) vaulted ceiling had
been designed, processed, sent from Britain to Canada and
then on to the USA, to be erected in two days.

JO himself, the Architect of the whole building, drew,
using his own architectural iconography, then inked and
painted (partly in the Marriott Medical Hotel Houston) a
freehand A1+ sized watercolour. This was photographed onto a
10"x8" colour transparency which was scanned at 12,000 lpi,
on a Crosfield drum machine, to make a Photoshop file of
750MB.

This was transmitted by 'sneakernet' in a portable hard
drive, back to JOA's office, where it was 'tiled' by Anthony
Charnley, using Live Picture software run on Apple Macintosh
computers, into 234 No 2' x 8' (0.6M x 2.4M) strips. Each
strip had a 2" (50mm) selvedge on which was printed its
alpha-numeric location code on the ceiling. The size of the
print had to be exactly calculated so that the grey would
wrap around out of the way, yet the tile-face pattern so
exactly meet its four neighbours that all 234 would join
back into the original A1 design now enlarged 32 times.

At no time were the colour values of the scan altered, in
either Photoshop or Live Picture, up to this time. At the
time (1995) JOA did not have sufficiently powerful
machinery.

This digital information just fitted onto one CdRom of
650 Mb. It was sent up to John Ruddock of Messrs.
Scanachrome, of Skelmersdale, Lancashire, where it was
'painted', with a computer controlled, wide body, 4-colour
acrylic spray head 'printer'. This was paint, not ink. It
will not fade. The light-levels on an internal ceiling are
minimal. The pigment was applied to a washable, flame
proofed and acoustically transparent vinyl fabric from Ohio
(that had passed the American technical tests).

The colour-values were very simply chosen by J.O.
directly altering the 4-colour graphs on the Scanachrome
computers and printing-out test strips. The whole ceiling is
completely hand-and-eye-driven. The computer, in this
process, has no more 'conceptual' status than a paintbrush.
Paint does not think, and neither do digital synapses. But
they are both triksy things and one must learn how to use
them.

These 234 No. 'painted' fabric strips were placed into a
shallow, coffin-sized, box and flown to Chris Wisener of
Decoustics, Toronto, Canada (a bespoke ceiling tile
manufacturer). Here they were wrapped around 1" (25 mm)
thick fibreglass ceiling tiles and shipped down to Messrs.
Marek of Houston, internal lining specialists. Marek erected
a Lafarge metal grid curved to a rise of 9'0" (2.7M) over a
span of 52'0" (16M). The 234 tiles were secret-fixed,
butt-jointed, in two days. As all lighting and ventilation
is from the 'Sixth Order' Working Columns, the only services
behind the ceilings, and their only penetrations, are some
small sprinkler heads that are quite lost in the overall
pattern-composition.

CONCLUSION

JOA have proved, with the Sue and Steve Shaper Ceiling
that a separate tribe of 'artists' are unnecessary to a
cultured modern Architecture. All that is required is a
tribe of iconically literate Architects - something that has
been bred out of the species during the last 50 years!
Failing this then the profession of 'surface-scripting'
should be termed a variety of 'engineering' which I call
'iconic', and see as merely one of the tribe of attendant
Engineers that the lifespace-design industry requires. I
look forward to the development of an Institute of Iconic
Engineering to help make the human lifespace fit for
thinking beings.